everymonstrousthing | (no subject)

(no subject)

There is shit going on in the city, but the Crow Club stays open. Kaz is of the opinion that there is nothing more valuable in a storm than the perception of a safe harbour. It's quiet, but that doesn't mean it's not worth being open. With his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his gloves still firmly in place, Kaz cleans. He empties the back bar and he cleans. Yes, he could pay someone to do this but, honestly, there's never a job done as well as he would do it himself.

Unless Inej does it. And he won't ask her to clean for him.

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"Kaz Brekker, Ketterdam in Kerch," says Kaz, and he doesn't offer his hand. "That's an interesting name."

"I chose it when I started working as a mercenary. I like the article at the front. Makes me sound like I'm not even a person, just a mindless weapon, an implement of destruction. It works for me."

Bull took another drink. He had to bring Krem here, see if they could find something that could be the equivilant of maraas-lok.

"If everyone knows you're a monster, then you don't need to waste time on every monstrous thing," says Kaz, still replacing things on the back-bar, working methodically. "I can see the value in that."

In Ketterdam, it had been a game that he loved best of all.

Bull looked at him keenly and he smiled. "Yeah, and when you look like me, the effort is minimal." Bull didn't have to project anything monstrous; he just had to exist. But when he did, it was particularly effective. It didn't hurt that he really did like killing things, or that he was good at it.

"You a monster where you come from, Brekker?"

The boy was all sharp edges in well tailored clothes. Bull had seen the look before.

"Some people tell you I was," he says, glancing up, a strand of hair slipping across his forehead. "The others hadn't met me yet."

"What kind of monster were you?"

Bull could guess; he was actually positive he had a pretty good idea of what kind of monster a person like Brekker could be. But asking was fun, too. He finished his drink, slid the glass across the bar to solicit more.

"What kind of monster do you think I was?" Asks Kaz, turning his shoulders towards Bull, giving him his full attention for a moment.

Bull looked at him, considering. "One that people don't always take for a monster. One that proved them wrong quickly, efficiently. An underworld monster. You don't command armies, you're not a thug - not like that. You trade in coin and information to get what you need and what you want."

"Plenty of merchs back in Ketterdam would have been happy to tell you that I was a thug," he says, picking up the bottle to top up Bull's glass, keeping a mental note. "Unworld is right. Coin, too."

"That's the trick, right? Gotta ask the right people." Bull grinned. "My trade was information. And killing things." And he was good at both - really good. As soon as his glass was full, Bull took another drink from it.

"When most people see a cane, all they see is a cripple," says Kaz, straightening his hair with one gloved hand. "And that's useful, sometimes." His coffee-dark eyes dart down to Bull's knee brace.

"It is," he said. "Hard for me to get away with that ruse. Too big, too monstrous. No one seemed willing to assume I'd be slowed down by a bum leg or missing eye."

Enough had figured out that he didn't catch things on the left fast enough, though. Some managed to take advantage.

"I can see why that would be a challenge," says Kaz, pouring himself a drink, going back on something that he'd said earlier. "Not a problem I ever had." Kaz is tall, yes, and relatively broad, but the tailoring hides that, rather than announcing it, and the cane? The cane just underlines everything.

"No, I don't think it was." Bull grinned and adjusted his weight again, briefly leaning it on his left leg before easing it back onto the right.

"Why crows?" he asked.

"Because I'm Dregs," says Kaz. "Through and through." Not as true as it would have once been, not with his girl's initials and a flood of flowers where, once, his Dregs tattoo would have been. Crows because they were clever, because they remembered human faces. Crows because they knew who hurt them, and who helped. Crows because they mourned and plotted. And understood.

Bull nodded, taking that in, rolling it around as he thought of the crow as a symbol. Kaz wouldn't be the first person he met that claimed it. "I'd rather deal with Crows than the Nightingale."

"Why do I feel like there's a story there?" asks Kaz, sipping the drink that he's poured for himself.

"Because there is," he laughed. "You wanna go one for one? I'll tell you a story, you tell me one." Bull wasn't in the habit of hemorrhaging information, unless it was information he could afford to share. He had plenty of that, but he was also curious.

Kaz weighs that up for a moment. There was a time when he would have guarded every single sliver of information, kept it in his chest like a second heart. But Darrow isn't Ketterdam, is it? A lot of things are different here.

"Alright."

"The Nightingale is a spymaster, for the Inquisition, which hired me. I'm a spy, my people wanted me in the Inquisition to get and share information. But having two spies work together is like... expecting to alley cats to get along. Lots of circling and hissing."

"I can imagine," says Kaz, raising his eyebrow as he takes a sip of his drink. "I never had much time for networks."

"But you did have them," he guessed, looking over at Kaz. "I don't know anyone that works in the underworld that doesn't." Sure, people could go it alone, but that would only get them so far.

"Of course I had them," says Kaz, nodding. "Thought they were all Dregs. I didn't trust anyone else. I barely trusted those bastards."

"Not trusting is part of the business. You don't get to be as old as I am in this business if you trust too much." He had a narrow few, a number he could count on one hand. Two of them were in Darrow.

"I promised the Nightingale reports from my people, our spy network, and I delivered them. But she had a choice - she could either let me translate them, and trust that I was giving her what she needed, or she had to translate them herself, which would have been difficult if the letters were written in straight-forward Qunlat. Never mind in code."

Kaz is eighteen, but he knows that to be true. Here, he'd still be in high school. In Ketterdam, he'd been surviving on his wits for years.

"Clever," he says. "You become indispensable."